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Subscriptions

This page covers the many ways you can use Jetpack’s Subscriptions module to let visitors to your site sign up to receive notifications of your latest posts and comments.

How does it work?

Many visitors land on your site once, never to return. Convert more visitors into regular readers by making it easy to subscribe to your site so new content is pushed directly to them. Jetpack takes care of letting them know whenever you publish a new post.

We can make this part of Jetpack because of WordPress.com: the WordPress.com servers handle the messy work of sending and managing all the email for you. Your blog is still yours, but subscriptions are handled, by us, for free, on your behalf.

How to turn Subscriptions on

Subscriptions requires no special magic to activate. Once you activate Jetpack on your site, Subscriptions will be on by default, however, you will need to set up a few Jetpack features to take full advantage of this great service!

Visitors can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they’ve commented on so they can stay involved in the conversation.

Where will subscriptions appear on my site?

Signup options for Subscriptions can appear in 3 places. One is on by default; the 2 others you have to activate manually.

1. By default, you’ll see two new checkboxes at the bottom of the comment form of every post and page. It’ll look something like this, depending on the theme you’re using and whether or not you’re using Jetpack Comments (screenshot is using Jetpack Comments):

2. You can also add the Jetpack Subscriptions widget to your sidebar, which we strongly recommend. Go to your Dashboard, and head over to Appearance → Widgets. You’ll see a widget called Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack). Click and drag it to the part of your sidebar where you’d like it to appear. Easy!

3. You can also include the Subscriptions form anywhere on your site. To do so, add the following shortcode to any page or post:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

You can customize this shortcode by using the following modifiers:

title – You can change the default “Subscribe to Blog via Email” to your own custom text by using title. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form title="My Custom Title"]

subscribe_text – This will change the default “Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.” text. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form subscribe_text="My custom subscribe text!"]

show_subscribers_total You can choose to show your total number of subscribers alongside your form. You can use 0 to hide them (the default) or 1 to show them. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form show_subscribers_total="1"]

What will my blog readers see when subscribing?

Visitors subscribe by typing in their email address. In a few minutes they’ll receive a confirmation email that looks like something like this:

Once they click the “Confirm Follow” button, they’ll receive a notification of every future post by email. Each email will have a link at the bottom to Manage Subscriptions, so they can unsubscribe at any time if they choose. Also, if they ignore the confirmation email, they won’t receive anything from your site.

Note: You can customize the contents of this confirmation email by going to Settings → Reading in your dashboard.

Can I customize the content of the subscription emails?

If you go to Settings → Reading in your dashboard, you can change your Feed Settings to “Summary”. Once you save your changes, all subscription emails will only include an excerpt of your post, with a link to continue reading on the site.

If your Feed settings are set to “Full Post”, you can split the content of each one of your blog posts in two parts thanks to the More tag, . Everything that is above the More tag will appear on your home page and in the subscription emails, followed by a link inviting users to click to continue reading; everything that is below that tag will only appear on the post’s page.

Can I see who my subscribers are?

Click on the link labeled ‘Blog’ to see a list of email address for all the people who have subscribed.

How to transfer your Followers from one site to another?

So you’ve moved from WordPress.com to your very own Jetpack-powered site? We can help you transfer your WordPress.com Followers and your email subscribers from your old site to the new one. We have details on our Transferring Subscribers support page.

Important Notes

Jetpack Subscriptions will only send out notifications for new posts. Publishing other post types (Pages, a Custom Post Type, etc) or updates of already published posts will not send a notification e-mail.